Welcome to the Truth Time Podcast.
Now for a shot of truth with no chaser.
Here's Trey Searcy with today's podcast.
Last time we looked at atonement, today forgiveness, still to come, righteousness, justification, and finally, reconciliation.
Some quote "right dividers" have chosen to conflate and redefine these words because they're having a difficult time convincing others of their limited forgiver theology.
Right divider isn't a title anyway.
To rightly divide the word of truth is what we do, not who we are.
In Christ we're called to be ambassadors who've been given the ministry of reconciliation to preach the word of reconciliation.
Several listeners have been sending us some strange quotes coming from this one fellow.
We used a couple on the last podcast.
He's now telling others that if they want to understand the word, "justification," if they want to understand what it means instead of comparing scripture with scripture, he suggests that you trust the public sermons of the King James translators.
Think of that.
To get your understanding of the meaning of the word justification, you must study the translator's sermons.
So that's what Paul meant in 2 Timothy 2:15, study the translators to show thyself approved unto God.
Their sermons are the final authority.
Okay, a strange belief from a right divider.
He said, quote, "How do some people know more about the meaning of the words than the translators themselves?"
Well, if the translators understood the true meaning of these words, they would not have held to some of their theological positions, now would they?
Not a single one of them taught the word of truth rightly divided.
So why should our allegiance be to them instead of God's word itself?
If my allegiance is to the translators, I need to change my position and stop following the apostle Paul.
They didn't.
You won't find that instruction in their sermons.
They had no idea of the Pauline position.
If they had understood all of the words and their meanings according to the context, they would have been Pauline.
They would have been ministers of reconciliation who taught salvation correctly.
Hey, they were translators, not apostles.
They were not called by God to dispense our instructions for this dispensation of grace.
Furthermore, if we do not believe that the translators could unbiasedly translate the
scriptures for us, then we don't have a Bible we can trust.
Throw it in the trash.
But they did, you see.
Thankfully these gentlemen were more than capable of translating the Bible without prejudice, without bias, without the insertion of their own private theology.
But these quotes from this fellow are priceless.
Imagine someone claiming to be a King James Bible believer but has more confidence in
the sermons and writings produced by the translators than the actual translation itself.
Amazing.
He's also one that doesn't understand the body of Christ is not the born again we read of in scripture.
And he bases that on Paul using the word, regeneration.
But that's what conflating gets you.
OK.
On our last episode, we covered atonement.
Atonement is God's prescribed method for how to get your sins forgiven.
We showed with scripture the fact that forgiveness was the immediate result of the atonement being acceptable to God.
We addressed the fact that without forgiveness, reconciliation could never be accomplished.
Throughout this series, we're going to isolate and focus on the requirements for salvation unto everlasting life for those in the time-past economy and eternal life for we who are in this but-now economy, the dispensation of grace.
We're going to break down these terms that too often are conflated and used as synonyms for one another, thereby corrupting the actual meanings and concepts for which these terms were given.
We encourage you to keep a watchful eye out for men who assign corrupt definitions to
words in an attempt to further promote a private agenda.
By the time we're finished with this series, the actuality of God's reconciling the world unto himself, how this was accomplished, and why, should be clear.
Forgiveness is a personal choice not to hold someone in contempt for the wrongs they have committed towards you.
Your decision to truly forgive someone has nothing to do with whether or not they ask
for it, whether or not they accept it, or even believe it.
The reality of forgiveness is not a decision determined by the guilty party.
The power of forgiveness does not belong to the guilty party, it belongs to the forgiver.
It should be quite obvious, but for some it's a conundrum, especially for limited forgivers who have a myopic blind spot.
That God forgave the sins of the world on the cross through the perfect sacrifice of
his only begotten Son who knew no sin yet became sin for us is something that is, quite frankly, not an easy concept for the traditional, performance-based world of religion to grasp.
Years of indoctrination and brainwashing make it a foreign concept to those who believe they must keep a short account of sin with God, constantly confessing, trying to do their best and live their way into heaven, never knowing if their best is good enough, which leads to their fear of falling out of fellowship with God, or even falling straight into the pit of hell due to behavioral issues.
It's a sad thing.
And on the flip side of the devil's coin, we also have those who teach and adhere to
the idea that their belief in something, whether it be belief in God, Jesus, the Bible, or even the gospel, they have the idea, the notion that this will cause them to merit forgiveness of sins.
This view is more of a hybrid version of performance-based salvation.
What it does is it incorporates a version of grace into its teachings, but that grace
is limited.
It's not unto all.
The only difference is the performance is not outward, but inward.
It is doing something to merit favor with God, which you cannot.
You cannot merit favor with God regarding something He did.
The limited-forgivers version of grace applies only to believers.
They make the claim that you get forgiveness only after you believe.
The ball's in your court.
For the sake of doctrinal identification, we call any performance-based salvationist,
whether they adhere to the traditional version or the hybrid version, we call them limited-forgivers.
A well-deserved title given due to the fact that their understanding of God's forgiveness only applies to a limited number of people.
These limited-forgivers, the ones of the hybrid variety, they're very circular in their reasoning and not cohesive in their understanding, making it difficult for them to fully accept or teach Paul's gospel.
It's a form of his gospel.
But if you're not teaching reconciliation, you're not teaching his gospel.
They somehow have God's forgiveness stored away, reserved somewhere as a, quote, provision to each person for a future time of the individual's choosing, when they choose to believe the gospel.
And none have even a mildly detailed description of how this process works or where the provisional forgiveness is stored.
And they have no such pattern in scripture for this provisional forgiveness, they claim, that is applied to each individual only upon belief.
They've created a mess.
By the way, when we are speaking scripturally concerning, quote, "provision," we would do well to keep in mind that the only examples of provision, the only ones we have given to us in the Bible, have to do with food, water, and or money, and sometimes building materials.
Often the provision of the necessities was put together for a journey.
You'll find that back in the Old Testament.
And God made provision for the items needed for Solomon to build the temple, a provision is something to be used later.
We've searched, but we cannot find anywhere in scripture an example of God's forgiveness being a provision, something that is stored up for the future, for future use, for forgiveness.
We find it nowhere.
So either we've missed it or the limited forgivers have made it up.
What do you think?
They fail to realize that forgiveness has always been granted immediately, as soon as
the required atonement was fulfilled.
There's a plethora of verses to support us on this.
Go read Leviticus chapter 4, verse 20, 26, 31, 35.
Go to chapter 5 and check out verse 10, verse 13, 16, 18.
Continue on, just flip the page, go to chapter 6.
Check out verse 7.
And don't stop there.
Flip on over to chapter 19, look at verse 22.
And let's not forget the book of Numbers, chapter 15 verse 25 and verse 28.
Yeah, God's word, not man's.
You see, some proponents of this limited forgiveness, this false doctrine, they even teach that the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 only applies to believers.
We've heard some say that one must believe they were forgiven on the cross in order to be forgiven by the cross.
And oddly enough, my wife just saw one today on social media making the claim that the death, burial, and resurrection is not even about forgiveness of sins.
And we received an email from one of our listeners telling us of a limited-forgiver grace teacher with a church in Louisiana who is now saying that even Jesus himself had to get forgiveness.
It appears that the goalpost continues to move.
While these views have evolved over the years with each new argument, the ones we hear against forgiveness of the world's sins occurring on the cross, the limited-forgivers, they end up moving themselves further and further away from the truth, the truth of the gospel.
They do so in an effort to prove themselves right while attempting to prove the true purpose of the ministry of reconciliation as simply a heresy.
Conflate, conflate, conflate.
They have conflated different terms to essentially mean the same thing.
They argue that terms like forgiveness, salvation, justification, and righteousness are just synonyms for one another.
They can be used interchangeably.
Well, there are huge issues with this type of scriptural interpretation.
First of all, it's private.
It's private interpretation.
Not only is it impossible to just swap these words out for one another and maintain the integrity of context, but it's also a biased, eisegetical understanding.
Ironically, for those who do not actively practice religion, the concept of God's forgiveness through the sacrificial atonement of Christ, when explained correctly, it's not usually hard for them to grasp.
Having spoken to many, the usual reaction is understanding and belief resulting in overwhelming gratitude for the atoning sacrifice that was made on their behalf.
This is news to many.
They've never had it presented this way because they've been exposed to so much limited forgiveness throughout their life.
Many of these limited forgivers have no clue what it is to be a minister of reconciliation.
They'll say 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, but they don't have any idea of what it actually means.
Concerning forgiveness, they are plagued with contradictory statements.
Their argument is so weak, they resort to calling ministers of reconciliation universalists, a false claim to only try to deflect from the fact that they can't debate this.
It's impossible to teach and preach the forgiveness of sins on the cross while excluding the death burial and resurrection of Christ.
Likewise, it is impossible to believe one's sins were forgiven on the cross without understanding how the death burial and resurrection of Christ made it possible for God to stop imputing the sins of the world in order to offer salvation to all.
It's not salvation to all, it's salvation is offered to all.
Scriptures are plain.
Men's books, on the other hand, they are not.
Some of the limited forgivers and those on the opposite side of the coin, the universalists, both have to rely on man's books and his theories instead of just going to God's word to prove your point.
Neither can prove their point in context.
They have to rip from the context and mix it with their own man-made theology.
The apparent confusion of limited forgivers is put on full display with such statements as, quote, If the whole world is forgiven, then that means no one goes to hell.
This is an obvious distortion of the word forgiven, only touted by the unlearned.
As we've stated over and over ad nauseum, salvation and forgiveness are different words with different meanings, and likewise justification and forgiveness are different words as well.
And guess what?
They have different meanings.
Righteousness and forgiveness, yep, different word, different meaning, they're not the same.
As a matter of fact, the only connection between forgiveness with justification and righteousness is the simple fact that forgiveness paves the way for righteousness and justification of an individual to be possible.
A faulty understanding of the term forgiveness, its implication and lack thereof, is where this confusion tends to breed more confusion.
The lazy-minded are not studying the Bible anymore, they're just simply studying what
men tell them.
This faulty understanding of the term forgiveness only dumbs down the crosswork into something that has to be believed in order to make it a factual event.
Hey, your mental assent of something does not make it true any more than your disbelief will make it false.
Christ finished the atonement for the world, God forgave the world, period.
Forgiven does not mean justified.
Forgiven does not mean righteous.
Forgiven does not even mean not guilty.
And forgiven certainly does not mean saved.
These limited forgivers are limited in knowledge, and they've come up with a notion that forgiveness of sins does not occur until after a person has been justified and or made righteous.
However, this argument totally faceplants when one is asked this question, what justified, righteous person is in need of forgiveness?
Huh?
Logically speaking, if a person can be made righteous and or justified before being forgiven, the act of forgiven sin is rendered as a useless action done by God.
No need for it.
Now listen closely, according to Deuteronomy 25:1, you want some Bible or you want a man to mansplain this for you?
Here's the Bible.
Deuteronomy 25:1, if there be a controversy between men and they come into judgment that the judges may judge them, then they shall justify the righteous and condemn the wicked.
Did you hear that?
That's God's word.
According to God, a person must be judged as righteous before being declared justified.
But never let God's word disturb a good false narrative, huh?
To be clear, only the righteous are counted as justified.
Now if someone can find me a righteous and therefore justified person that is also simultaneously in need of forgiveness regarding the things that they are justified from, further conversation might be needed.
But until then, I don't think so.
And I challenge you to find me that scripture or scriptures.
But I submit no such person exists.
Does being forgiven equal not guilty?
Certainly not.
If a guilty party is forgiven for a wrong, it doesn't mean the wrong is erased.
It means the party that was offended isn't holding the wrong against the one who is guilty.
Only the justified are found not guilty.
I turn your attention to Exodus chapter 34 verse 7.
Here we read, "Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children unto the third and the fourth generation."
And let's not stop there.
Numbers chapter 14 verse 18.
"The Lord is longsuffering and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty."
You got that, right?
Forgiven iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty.
You best go behind these men who are conflating these words and calling them synonymous.
They are not.
These two verses, I mean, I know this is God's word, this isn't in a man's book, this isn't in a man's notes, this isn't in a man's sermons.
That's just God's word, Trey, you really, that's all you need?
Yeah, these two verses tell us clearly that forgiveness does not remove guilt.
Justification does, but forgiveness does not.
Stop following after the pied pipers trying to convince you otherwise.
The amazing thing is, even though we just shut the door on the false narrative floating around grace circles, for some it won't change a thing.
It won't change their belief one iota.
They've invested too much in the lie for them to change now.
To them, their investment is greater than the truth.
But again, never let God's word disturb a good false narrative.
God does not declare us not guilty by His forgiveness of our sins.
That's a lie.
He isn't holding those sins against us.
Judicially, He cannot, because those sins were imputed to Christ on our behalf.
But that doesn't mean we are not guilty of committing the sin that His sacrifice atoned for.
One is not legally declared not guilty until they are counted as justified.
Forgiveness never justifies sin.
Sin is never justified.
Sin can only be forgiven.
Christ died for the world's sins.
God was in Christ because Christ is God.
He was in Christ on the cross.
God ceased imputing sins to the world when they were put on Christ.
Some limited forgivers go on and on about the timing of when this took place.
Some say it was while Jesus was walking the earth before He was crucified.
Yeah, we heard that.
And that the 2 Corinthians 5:19, oh, it somehow means that God was through Christ, not imputing Israel's sins to them.
What?
This goes against the clear declaration of unrighteousness toward Israel, spoken by Christ Himself to Israel before the cross.
Obviously, their sins were being called out and condemned.
How is that the same as not imputing their sins?
It's not.
And we have those who are doing grammatical gymnastics to make the fact of God's reconciliation that occurred on the cross something that God has continually been doing for the last 2,000 years.
This line of thinking has some obvious issues with its conclusions, as well as the logical questions it would gender for any thinking person.
This is in line with what we stated earlier about the provision of forgiveness being made at the cross, but yet being stored away somewhere, waiting to be granted to certain individuals.
That's nonsense.
Again, we would ask, where is the storage location?
Where is the description of this stored-away forgiveness we hear about?
That's reserved only for those who believe and get into the body of Christ.
Where's this found in Scripture?
How does the forgiveness get applied?
Where's the Scriptural pattern we can go to and find this?
How can God be consistently and perpetually forgiving individuals without requiring sacrificial atonement for each instance, when that is exactly what He Himself prescribed as the message to get one's sins forgiven.
How does that work?
And doing so while also simultaneously being at rest, is Christ perpetually sprinkling His own blood on the mercy seat until the rapture to reaffirm His atonement and cause God to forgive every single individual on the merit of belief, or is He seated at the right hand of God resting?
There are so many problems they have, so many questions that arise from these distorted teachers teaching this nonsense, these distorted teachings that place God in a perpetual state of forgiving and reconciling, rather than accepting God at His own word, when He tells us what He has done, past tense.
And no, we cannot compare the "was" in John 1 verse 1 with the "was" of 2 Corinthians 5:19.
Won't work.
Some are doing this and they claim that these two usages are the same.
When we read that the Word was God in John 1:1 and know that the Word still is God, we understand this because it is the state of His eternal being.
While the was in 2 Corinthians 5:19 is a modifier of what God was doing, He was reconciling the world unto Himself.
You cannot compare a description of God being with a description of God doing and pretend like it is the same thing.
It is not.
This in no way will prove that God is in a perpetual state of forgiving and reconciling.
It only proves that you aren't paying attention to King James grammar.
Furthermore, since when is what God decided to be so at a particular time dependent on anything that mankind does or decides to believe?
If God decided to cease imputing trespasses to the world and instead impute them unto
His Son, He's free to do so.
How does the fact of whether or not we believe He did that determine whether or not He really did that?
It doesn't.
Forgiveness doesn't even belong to us in the first place.
Daniel chapter 9 verse 9.
Go read it sometime.
Enough with a mansplaining.
Just let God do it through His prophet.
The prophet Daniel says, "To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against Him."
The only thing that has been continual concerning reconciliation is mankind's reconciliation of himself to God by believing that his sins were imputed to Christ on the cross and that Christ was buried with those sins and rose the third day without those sins.
God isn't reconciling a world to Himself that He has yet to forgive and is still angry with concerning their sins.
No, He has already reconciled the world that He already forgave.
The only thing left to do in response to that is to be ye reconciled to God.
In forgiving the sins of the world on the cross, God reconciled the world unto Himself.
That is not an ongoing process.
God is not continually reconciling the world unto Himself.
He did it once, one time, and that was enough.
Why?
Because Christ's one-time sacrifice was good enough.
God's declaration of no longer being angry with a world, you know, that world that Paul describes in Romans 1, God has forgiven that big long list we can read there, the big long list of offenses against Him.
What God did regarding those sins, He said to the world, I forgive you for your abominations against Me, and I am doing this for the sake of My Son, who paid for all of those abominations with His atoning sacrifice of Himself.
But even though I forgive you, and I'm not pouring out My wrath against you, you are
still dead to Me.
You see, if you're not alive in Christ, you're forgiven, but you're spiritually lifeless.
You're dead.
He has forgiven and forgotten.
As a matter of fact, He has not just forgotten your sins, He's forgotten you.
You're dead to Him, and in order to become alive, you have to be resurrected with Christ.
If not, you're dead, and you know where death goes in the end, right?
It's cast into the lake of fire.
You see, this is why we don't preach condemnation here at Truth Time.
This is why we as ministers of reconciliation do not focus on telling the lost how bad they are.
Lost people are dead.
How are you going to condemn a dead man?
What good does that do?
That's why you don't hear us going on about how there are people in hell with forgiven sin.
That isn't good news to anyone.
It's a fact, but that doesn't make it good news.
Dead people are walking the earth right now as forgiven dead people.
Dead people are in hell right now as forgiven dead people.
Lifeless.
The only difference is that the ones who are above ground still have the opportunity to receive life.
For the rest, it's too late.
Today is the day of salvation, not yesterday, not last week, not last year, not tomorrow, not next week, and certainly not after you're six feet under.
It's today, now.
Being forgiven doesn't save you.
Being forgiven doesn't make you not guilty.
Being forgiven doesn't bring you to life.
Being forgiven doesn't make you righteous, and if you aren't righteous, you can't possibly be justified.
Forgiven dead people don't make it to heaven.
Justified alive with Christ people do.
In the next episode, we're going to talk more about forgiveness with a focus on righteousness and what is meant when the term righteousness is used in the Scriptures.
We will explain with Scripture the reasons why forgiveness and righteousness are not
the same.
And later in the series, we're going to talk about justification and explain why there is no way, according to Scripture, that justification is the same thing as righteousness, and why it cannot possibly be the same thing as forgiveness.
Isolate these terms.
They're different, and these terms are important.
It's important that we understand what God means when He uses them in His Book.
We are deconstructing that blender theology that has permeated and distorted the preaching of the gospel worldwide.
Within all religions and grace denominations, camps, groups, we are isolating these terms and looking closely to what they do mean, as well as what they don't mean.
They are not interchangeable.
They aren't literary expressions that were added just to lend to soft speech and creativity in writing.
No, these terms have distinct and specific meanings.
Forgiveness does not automatically result in righteousness, justification, or salvation.
And we're going to tell you why, according to what God has said, not what a teacher,
a dictionary, a seminary, or even because of what a group of right dividers told you.
This is evidence straight from the Scriptures minus the twistianity.
You'll either believe what the Bible says about it, or you won't.
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